Favorite Books‘Satanic Verses’‘The Moor’s Last Sigh’‘Midnight’s Children’‘Chronicle of a Death Foretold’‘Love in the Time of Cholera’‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet’‘Harlot’s Ghost’‘Tough Guys Don’t Dance’

1. ‘Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono’

You who hear the sound, in scattered rhymes,
of those sighs on which I fed my heart,
in my first vagrant youthfulness,
when I was partly other than I am,

I hope to find pity, and forgiveness,
for all the modes in which I talk and weep,
between vain hope and vain sadness,
in those who understand love through its trials.

Yet I see clearly now I have become
an old tale amongst all these people, so that
it often makes me ashamed of myself;

and shame is the fruit of my vanities,
and remorse, and the clearest knowledge
of how the world’s delight is a brief dream.